Auction

… Verisign has been given the all-clear by the US government to go ahead and run the new gTLD .web, despite competition concerns. The Department of Justice told the company yesterday that the antitrust investigation it launched almost exactly a year ago is now “closed”. Verisign’s secret proxy in the 2016 auction, the original .web applicant Nu…

… ICANN has postponed the planned auction of the .kid(s) gTLDs after an appeal from one of the applicants. The last-resort auction had been penciled in for January 25, and there was a December 8 deadline for the three participants to submit their info to the auctioneer. But DotKids Foundation, the shallowest-pocketed of the three, filed…

… Verisign’s proposed auction of the domain o.com might have a negative effect on competition and is to be referred to US regulators. That’s according to ICANN’s response to the .com registry’s request to release the domain, which is among the 23 single-letter domains currently reserved under the terms of its contract. ICANN has determined…

… One of the applicants for the .kids gTLD has asked ICANN to stop the planned last-resort auction. DotKids Foundation is competing with Amazon for .kids and, because the two strings were ruled confusingly similar, with Google’s application for the singular .kid. ICANN last month set a January 25 date for the three contenders to go to auction…

… The internet could soon gets just its fourth active single-character .com domain name, after Verisign revealed plans to auction off o.com for charity. The company has asked ICANN to allow it to release just one of the 23 remaining one-letter .com domains, which are currently reserved under the terms of the .com registry agreement. It’s…

… Amazon, Google and a third applicant are scheduled to fight for control of the new gTLDs .kid or .kids at auction. It’s the first ICANN gTLD auction to be scheduled since a Verisign puppet paid $135 million for .web in July 2016. According to ICANN documentation, .kid and .kids will go to auction January 25, 2018. The winning bid…

… US civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has reclaimed the domain name nigger.com after it expired and went to auction. The names nigger.org and nigger.net were also affected, but according to Whois records the NAACP restored all three yesterday. The names had been in pending renewal/delete status…

…, requesting certain information related to Verisign’s potential operations of the .web TLD. The CID is not directed at Verisign’s existing registry agreements. He did not comment further, beyond describing it as “kind of like a subpoena”. Verisign acquired the rights to run .web at an ICANN last-resort auction last July, agreeing to pay $135 million…

… There’s still about week to go until this year’s NamesCon conference kicks off in Las Vegas, but the live auction that will close the first day of the show has already seen pre-bidding action. One batch of domains has already received a high bid of $1,010,000, but does not appear to have yet met its reserve. The batch is led by bar.com…

… Nic.at’s three-stage auction of one and two-character .at domains has raised over $1 million. Auction house Sedo announced today that over 1,000 .at names were sold, for a combined total of over $1 million. The biggest-ticket name was c.at, which went for €56,000, according to Sedo. Bidders were not restricted to Austria or German-speaking…

… Two of the industry’s oldest and biggest gTLD registries escalated their fight over the .web gTLD auction this week, trading blows in print and in public. Verisign, accused by Afilias of breaking the rules when it committed $130 million to secure .web for itself, has now turned the tables on its rival. It accuses Afilias of itself breaking…

… application, alleging at least three breaches of ICANN rules. Afilias says that by refusing to disclose Verisign’s support for its bid, NDC broke the rules and should have its application thrown out. The company also confirmed on the public record for what I believe is the first time that it was the second-highest bidder in the July 27 auction…

… Verisign has just confirmed that it was behind the winning bid in last week’s .web gTLD auction. Nu Dot Co won the auction after 23 rounds over two days of bidding, but Verisign was thought to be the real beneficiary. The company has now released the following statement confirming the relationship: The Company entered into an agreement…

… Verisign has emerged as the likely winner of the .web gTLD auction, which closed on Thursday with a staggering $135 million winning bid. The shell company Nu Dot Co LLC was the prevailing applicant in the auction, which ran for 23 rounds over two days. Just hours after the auction closed, Domain Name Wire scooped that Verisign had quietly…

… It seems likely that .web has already smashed through the $41.5 million record sale price for a new gTLD at ICANN auction. The auction, which kicked off properly at 1300 UTC yesterday, seems to have ended its first day of bidding at around 2300 UTC last night without a winner. That suggests, based on the rules and how previous auctions have…